Fire Ruled An Accident At Former Royal Factory

Factory Blaze An Accident

Fire Officials Say Probe At Royal Rules Out Arson

November 06, 1992|By ANITA M. SELINE; Courant Staff Writer

Fire officials say the fire in the former Royal Typewriter factory was an accident and have ruled out arson.

The ruling Thursday ends a four-month investigation into the July 12 fire that raged for a day and was battled by 100 firefighters. The incident has remained a $713,500 problem for Hartford, as the city has paid the overtime, demolition and cleanup costs associated with the blaze.

FOR THE RECORD - The Hartford fire marshal is John Vendetta. Vendetta's first name was incorrect in a story on Friday's onnecticut Page about the cause of the Royal ypewritter factory fire.

Fire Chief Nelson K. Carter and Fire Marshal Jim Vendetta said Thursday the fire started about 14 hours after firefighters had extinguished another, smaller fire caused by fireworks lodged in the window of the northeast corner of the building.

Carter and Vendetta acknowledged there has been wide speculation that the fire was set, and said that is why inspectors took four months to investigate the fire.

"I have faith in my fire prevention bureau, and that's what they concluded," Carter said.

"There was a lot of talk about the potential of it being a set fire," Vendetta said, so the investigators left "no stone unturned."

They give this explanation for the cause of the larger fire:

A flame, ember or heat from the first fire likely became trapped where the first-floor joist met the ceiling. There it burned quietly, or smoldered, and began to eat away at the ceiling board. Carter likened it to an ember glowing in a fireplace after the fire has burned down.

Once it had burned through the ceiling board, the smoldering fire was fed further by a 4-inch air space between the ceiling and the floor boards of the second floor.

Vednetta and Carter said this type of fire does not emit much smoke. The location of the fire also made it difficult to find.

"In order to detect something like that, you would have to cut a section of the joist, thereby making the building unsafe, and unsafe for the firefighter," Carter said.

At the first fire, located in a boarded-up window of the factory, firefighters tore away the window frame and floor boards around the fire site, but found nothing. In addition, fire inspectors, building inspectors and workers called in to board up the window found no traces of the nascent fire, Vendetta said.

"Once nothing was seen, there was no reason to go any further," Vendetta said.

Vendetta estimates the fire smoldered 12 to 14 hours. But once the fire burned through the ceiling and floorboards of the second floor and reached more oxygen, it ignited and spread quickly.

The fire soon escaped through a hole in the second-floor ceiling and up into the third floor. Eventually it reached the fourth floor and roof, where it spread across to other wings of the building. At one point, the blaze created a firestorm inside the building, Vendetta said.

The large middle section of the building was damaged by fire, with only the shell of the building left to be cleared in the demolition. Just two wings of the seven-winged building remain today.

Carter said that neither road construction on a side street that led to the factory nor a broken fire hydrant near the factory hampered firefighting efforts.

The building owners, The Hutensky Group and CDC Financial Corp., which owe $541,312 for three years of delinquent taxes on the property, also claim they have no fire insurance on the property